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If you have read the basics of selling on eBay, you are probably aware of how eBay works and are ready to sell at a bigger level. Making money on eBay works almost the exact way as making money with a regular store, wholesaling! Buying things at big quantities and selling them back individually.

One of the best ways to make money on eBay is through dropshipping. In fact, this is what the big and popular PowerSellers are doing everyday. Dropshipping on eBay is a very attractive method to selling because not only you do not have to stock anything yourself, but the risks of selling are limited.

What is dropshipping exactly? Dropshipping first involves a dropshipping company that holds a list and stocks products. You can in turn sell these products on eBay without even owning them. There are 2 great things about dropshipping; first you can sell it on eBay at whatever price you desire, and second, you provide the dropshipping company the address of your buyer and therefore you don’t even need to be in contact with the product to sell.

By the small description above, making easy money on eBay with dropshipping might sound a little too good to be true, and guess what, it is. The point is that there are several barriers and challenges to dropshipping. As you’re probably thinking, one of the challenges is to actually find a reliable dropshipping company that has the convenient prices for you to profit on eBay.

The accessibility and easy of use of eBay makes it a very competitive area. Finding a supplier is not enough anymore, you need to find a dropshipper that has the lowest prices possible. If you never sold on eBay, you might be thinking that you can try to list your item anyways, and if it doesn’t sell you don’t care since you haven’t paid for your product. The only problem is that listing on eBay is just not free.

Other problems arise with shipping the products. You are the middleman here, and you are just ordering the product to be shipped and aren’t doing it yourself. This can lead to many other problems, like lost items, damaged products or even worse, products that are “sold out” and no more in the inventory. These are the problems you risk when dealing with a dropshipper and not doing the shipping yourself.

So there you have it, yet another opportunity to make money, and this time, making money on eBay. The good thing with dropshipping is after you found your company of choice, started selling and seeing some profits, you can be a PowerSeller in no time

You already know that you can make money using other people’s forums, but what prevents you from starting your own forum?

Creating a forum is great because once it starts, it will keep growing by itself. Popular forums have thousands of new posts everyday, and new members registering all the time. If you can ever get to that level, your new forum can be one of the best source for passive income. Besides some moderation, of which many people will even volunteer doing it for free for you because of the power it gives them, there is hardly anything you need to do with a growing forum.

To make a forum, you first need your software. You have the choice of using phpBB or Vbulletin. Vbulltin is not free and phpBB is. They both have some unique features, but if you just starting out, phpBB is good enough. It may also help you decide knowing that GaiaOnline, the largest forum on the internet, uses phpBB. You can download and read all the tutorials on their site.

After you have set everything up, it’s time to fill up the forums. Which also means starting to get traffic. If you have a website or blog, you have to write all the content and information, and then get traffic. When you set up a forum, your traffic and the content of your forum are one; if you have content, this means you have traffic since it is your users who wrote everything. But getting to the point where everything works for you takes an incredible amount of work, and if you don’t want to speed things up, you will have to spend some money.

You will need money both for promotion and for paid post. If you are going to use promotion, it is best to have a website as well, and have the forum incorporated to it. Spending $1000 to have users visit your forum, only to find out it’s empty and leave, is not money well spent.

If you don’t want to have a site and want a forum only, you have 2 choices. Either you will have to make all the posts to kick start your forum by yourself, or need to pay someone to do it for you. The best way to do this is do both at the same time. To advertise in order to get people posting on your forum, you can post on Digital Point Forums. It is a great forum for anything that have to do with websites, selling websites, internet marketing, etc…

The fee you pay them is totally up to you, but to give you an idea I know many people who pay 0.10$ per post to fill their forums. With their post you can also make your posts at the same times to make everything go faster. Try to encourage replies and discussions when you post.

There is no magic formula to start a passive income forum, hard work and time are the only ingredients. Depending of how effort and/or money and time you are willing to spend, it may take at least 6-12 months before any kind of advertising you put on your forum starts generating profit.

Domains are the virtual real estate. Many people complain that all the good domains are gone and there is no more room for money in domains; those who were lucky to get the good domains in the early years are the only one to profit from domains.

Nothing could be further from the truth!

Unless your goal is to just go to a registrar and try to register a prime domain, then yes you are out of luck. On the other hand, if you want to invest in domains either by reselling domains or by making money parking domains, now is as good as anytime.

You have to think about domains and the internet as real estate. Domains are virtual real estate but they have many similarities with actual real estate. The argument real estate investors use to explain that no matter what happens to the price of housing, in the future, it will always go up simply because there is limited land and a growing number of people who want houses; you can not create land. This reasoning can be used for making money with domains as well; all the good domain names are already taken, so you can not re-create them, on the other hand, very few people can argue that the internet is bigger than ever and will keep growing. With this logic, a good domain that you buy now will inevitably increase its value simply with the rule of supply and demand.

I find that a great resource for learning more on domains and discussing with top players is at DnForum. You can find many bargains and there are many opportunities to buy and sell domains for profits with a small investment.

In every field there at least one huge player, and in domains, the domain king Rich Schwartz is the man. Here is someone who saw the opportunity of domains before anyone and took the plunge. Was he right? You bet. His portfolio of domains is now worth over 1 Billion dollars. You can find out more at eRealEstate and his personal blog at RicksBlog.

The Alexa Ranking is one of the most popular tools today to measure a websites ranking. There are 2 extremes when it comes to this popular tool. There’s a bunch of people who swear by it and consider it the only and best way to measure a website’s traffic, and there’s the other group of people who think Alexa is pure useless and doesn’t mean anything. In-between, there is the other group who say Alexa is not good for the sites that are of higher ranking, but a good measurement for the lower ranking ones.

Here is the thing. Traffic wise, the third group is right, or let’s just say, they are “more right” than the other 2. If your site is in the top 5,000 there is more chance that Alexa represents the ranking of the traffic better than the site in the 7 digits.

But the whole Alexa issue goes beyond the reasoning of these 3 groups. Alexa today is not only a measure of traffic, but also a measure of money. You see, money wise, little does it matter that Alexa represents your true traffic level when a big portion of people who work in the online industry think that it really matters. What am I talking about? Let’s pick 2 companies, Review Me and Pay Per Post. Both these companies let you put a pricing for every post you do for advertising a company. Both also make use of the Alexa Ranking. Why do they do that? Because they think it’s important! And they will pay you more because of it! For them, the Alexa Ranking is not only important, but a very important criteria. For you this means that even if you do know that you have a higher traffic level than someone else with a lower ranking, you might not get paid nearly close the other website because these companies actually Alexa is good.

In other words, depending of what you think about Alexa’s accuracy, if 90% of people around you are uninformed and think Alexa ranking is actually good, then I can guarantee you that it will affect you as well, whether you are right or wrong, given you want to make money advertising. I mentioned these 2 companies before, but Alexa goes beyond just getting paid for posts, for example selling domains, selling websites, putting advertising on your site, etc…

As you might already know, domains are still hot. A domain name represents your website and you. When you start a website or a blog, you of course want high traffic and people to know about it, and the only way to do that is with your domain name. You want to spread the word to your friends and to the online community. If you follow these simple guidelines, you can make sure you made the best choice when it comes to a good domain name.

First, you want to keep it as short as possible. The longer it is, the more chances there are to make typos. Short domains also have an appeal, people always like to make things as fast possible when they’re looking for something. By keeping it short, you gain an advantage.

Second, get the .COM all the time. The internet has been accustomed to the .COM from the beginning. A lot of people don’t even pronounce the extension sometimes since they think it’s implied. You can still be extremely successful with the .NET. You probably heard of Problogger.net. Darren Rowse has developed this .NET to one of the most popular blogs out there. No matter how popular, on my mind I always wanted to visit and know what Problogger.com was all about; by having the .NET, you are giving your competitor traffic to the .COM for no reason. Just recenlty, Darren finally bought Problogger.com for a few thousand dollars.

Third, do not use any hyphens or digits. The reason for this is you are most likely to use a multiple word domain unless you want to spend a few hundred thousand dollars, and it is just easier and more natural say or type letters only. Reaching for that dash on the keyboard doesn’t come in very often. Also saying “You can visit my site at XXXX “Dash” XXXX “Dash” XXXX .com isn’t very smooth.

Fourth, check for trademarks. The last thing you want is to have a website, developing it, and having even paid for the domain, and have a company take it for nothing since you infringed their trademark. Check the United States Patent and Trademark Office at http://www.uspto.gov.

Fifth, use Pool.com and SnapNames.com. Good domains, even multiple words, can come at a hefty price. And those that aren’t so high prime domains are often taken too, but the person who registered it isn’t doing much with it, by using these 2 sites, you can get most domains that are dropped for a fee, which is $60 plus yearly registration. If more people are bidding for the same domain, it will go to auction. However, from experience, even in auctions, the prices are generally much much lower as if a seller was actually trying to sell the domain.